A right pain in the ash

I made it to Iceland in the nick of time - less than an hour after my flight touched down in Keflavík, the Grímsvötn volcano erupted in south-east Iceland, covering the area around the Vatnajökull glacier with ash and grounding all international flights. This has repercussions for our volunteer programme, as our base camp in Skaftafell has been evacuated and it doesn't look like we´ll be going there any time soon!

The ash has also reached Reykjavík - it looked like a large thundercloud rolling in from the east last night (see pics below). Today we had planned to climb Mount Esja to the north of the city to assess the state of its hiking trails and test out a new surveying system, but just as we were about to set off, we received a call from the air monitoring people to tell us that the air quality was not safe at the top. Hopefully we will be able to go up later in the week. In the meantime we now have a free day, and given that the hostel we are staying in has dozens of back-issues of National Geographic dating back to the 1960s, I think I'll manage to entertain myself just fine!

Yesterday, though, was a glorious sunny day. I met up with Eva, a fellow volunteer who stayed in the same hostel as me for the first night, and we set off to explore the city. We went to the top of the famous Hallgrímskirkja for panoramic views of Reykjavík and beyond (see pic below of the toy houses!). We then decided on a whim decided to go to the Perlan exhibition centre to see what was there. It turned out to be hosting a travel and tourism show for the weekend, so we pottered around picking up leaflets and trying various free food samples, then by utter coincidence, Eva bumped into a friend of hers from a previous trip to Iceland, who had travelled all the way down from the north-west of the country! Jón then took us for lunch and we had a good chat about the Westfjörds region, where he runs a guesthouse and fishing excursions for tourists in a small village of 150 people. It sounds gorgeous and we promised to try and visit during our holiday week.

Ten volunteers have arrived so far and we are expecting around ten more by the end of the week. Our training starts at the weekend and has been relocated from ash-covered Skaftafell to Hólar, a small town in the north of the country. Those of us that are already here should be heading up there within the next couple of days to start setting things up. Hopefully! We'll see which way the wind blows...